Commercial meat processing plants and slaughter houses go to great lengths to reduce or eliminate, to the extent possible, the threat of bacterial or microbial contamination in their production facilities and, more importantly, in their meat products. The safe and clean handling and processing of meat is an essential step toward the prevention of those food borne illnesses that result when meat is contaminated with pathogenic microbes such as Clostridium botulinum, Campylobacter, Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, and others, and the U.S. government has established several laws directed toward this very purpose, such as Chapter 12 of the Federal Meat Inspection Act (21 U.S.C. 601, et seq.), and several regulations have been promulgated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture pursuant to these laws that govern the proper handling and processing of meat, such as Part 300 et seq. of Title 9 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Meat processing plants must regularly test the meat located within their production facilities for the presence of such microbes in order to remain compliant with these laws and regulations. Testing is done at several points along the production line, as well as at the packaging station, in order to ensure that the meat remains clean and uncontaminated throughout the production process. As may be expected, in order to comply with such laws and regulations, such testing must be performed pursuant to exacting governmental standards, which include strict guidelines as to the size of each sample of meat to be tested.
Several methods have been implemented to comply with these laws and regulations. Presently, meat processing plants station large bins at a plurality of locations along the production line, which are used to collect the trimmings from the meat then in production. These bins are large enough to hold approximately 2,000 pounds of trimmings, subprimal cuts (e.g. consumer cuts, retail cuts, or market ready cuts), or extra fat beef trimmings, all of which must be tested for the presence of microbial contaminants before they are packaged or sold. As can be appreciated, if the test results reveal the presence or absence of any microbial contaminant in a single bin, those results can be used to infer the presence or absence of that contaminant at the station of the processing plant where the bin is located. In order to obtain a sample of meat from the meat trimmings in such bins, a production facility employee will typically use a hook to remove a single piece of meat from a bin and then use a knife to cut a portion from the trimming, of the proper size and shape for testing, as aseptically as possible. Thereafter, the employee will transfer the cut sample into a plastic collecting bag and send it to be tested. Several series of tests are typically run from a single bin, each necessitating the talking of a sample, and each bin in the production facility must be tested at regular, recurring timed intervals. Therefore, the employee will have to perform the task of sampling numerous times at each bin, often several times per week, and it is common for the employee to hurry through the large number of samples in order to complete the task in a timely manner. Since each sample is cut by hand, there is little to no uniformity of size to the samples collected. Because the laws and regulations require testing of samples of a very specific size, it is often necessary to cut the samples again to the size and shape needed for proper testing.
In addition to the foregoing troubles, the risk of cross contamination is onmipresent with this traditional method, as the employee may pick up a contaminated trimming in one location of the meat processing plant and through human error or haste, transfer the contaminant to a different bin at a different location, thereby yielding a false result for the presence of a microbial pathogen in the second bin. It is also possible that the employee will contaminate a trimming directly through human contact with the sample, which will yield a false positive for an otherwise uncontaminated bin. These troubles beget yet another problem with this method in that the employees taking these samples are made aware of the risk of cross contamination and, to avoid human contact with the trimmings in the bin and thus cross-contamination, they compensate by removing and testing only those trimmings at the top of the bin, leaving the balance untested. The manual sampling task is therefore arduous, difficult, time consuming, variable and often dependent upon the vicissitudes of the operator.
In an attempt to overcome some of the foregoing difficulties, several devices have been created that are designed to obtain meat samples for various uses. One such device is a hand-held drill bit which includes a two-part rotating tubular blade threaded onto the chuck of the drill, such as that manufactured and sold by J&B Haig Products of Queensland, Australia. The blade of this drill bit has a fixed, non-scalable or adjustable, 22 millimeter internal diameter and is manufactured in two parts which must be threaded together to form the functional sampling bit, which is then threaded onto the chuck of a hand-held drill. The first part of the bit is a hollow, tubular metal carbide blade used to cut into the meat of interest that is threaded onto the second part of the bit, which is a non-carbide metal connecting tube used to connect both parts to a hand-held power drill. In operation, the device is used to drill the bladed tip into the meat of interest in order to remove a sample, which is then removed from the meat and ejected from the cylindrical blade. This device suffers from varying practical deficiencies including, most notably, the fact that it was not manufactured to help meat processing plants comply with the laws and regulations described above. Additionally, the bit is manufactured in two separate pieces, with each piece being made of a different material. Therefore, differences in the materials and the casting process can lead to variations in thickness between the two parts such that when the bladed tip and the connecting tube are threaded together they create structures, such as lips and recesses, at the point of threaded connection where meat, and thus microbial contaminants if they are present, may become embedded. This makes the two-part tube quite difficult to clean and sanitize, thereby perpetuating the risks of cross contamination described above. The sample size obtained from this device is too small for proper testing under U.S. law as the internal bore of the tubular blade does not yield a sample of sufficient size for testing. Additionally, because of the narrow internal diameter, the collected samples often become pulverized upon ejection from the device, which makes testing impossible as the samples need to be intact to comply with the foregoing laws and regulations. Other devices typically used to obtain samples of meat for varying purposes, such as those typically referred to in the commercial meat production industry as the “six-shooter” and the “single-shooter,” are large, bulky devices that were designed for a completely different purpose are thus not capable of being operated by a single user. These devices are typically used to sample meat and test for fat content, which necessitates the removal of very large samples inappropriate for use in microbial testing.